social.noyu.me

oh dear fucking lord microsoft have lost the plot

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/my-goal-is-to-eliminate-every-line-of-c-and-c-from-microsoft-by-2030-microsoft-bets-on-ai-to-finally-modernize-windows

I am nearly always in favour of rewriting things in Rust, but "we must rewrite the entirety of Windows in 5 years in a radically different language and we will achieve this with AI" is a recipe for a fucking catastrophe

Whether it will be a catastrophe depends on what you hope the future for Windows will be. Personally I hope this will be the opportunity for driving computer vendors to ship with a different operating system preinstalled.

The entire idea of using AI to rewrite your C code in a safe language sounds inherently flawed. Aren’t we expecting AI to find a way to produce unsafe code in every language?

One thought I have had is that rather than rewriting all C code in a safe language, why not make a C compiler that outputs safe code? The C language is quite flexible in what architecture and ABI the output is produced for, so wouldn’t it be possible to output safe code as well? For example I don’t see any reason a C compiler couldn’t output code using fat pointers and utilize other safety mechanisms. Of course the resulting code wouldn’t be as fast as we are used to for C code, but in some cases that’s an acceptable trade off.